The Bradshaw Variations
Search in google:
From the award-winning novelist Rachel Cusk comes a timely and absorbing story of the harmony and discord of family life.Since quitting work to look after his eight-year-old daughter, Alexa, Thomas Bradshaw has found solace and nourishment in his daily piano study, but his increasingly artistic way of life shocks his parents and his undermining in-laws. Why has he swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife? And how can this be good for Alexa?Tonie is increasingly seduced away from domestic life by the headier world of work, where long-forgotten memories of ambition are awakened. She finds herself outside their tight family circle, alive to previously unimaginable possibilities.Over the course of a year full of crisis and revelation, we follow their fortunes. The Bradshaw Variations reveals how our choices, our loves, and the family life we build will always be an echo—a variation—of a theme played out in our own childhood. This masterful and often shockingly funny novel shows Cusk to be a writer at the height of her powers.The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn the end, this slim but overstuffed novel rests heavily upon its overworked conceit, bending precariously beneath the weight Cusk places on it. It's the sort of book in which a character happens to be reading a thematically relevant story -- in this case, The Kreutzer Sonata itself -- at a key moment. ("What is art?" is also clearly intended to echo Tolstoy's opening, "What is love?" another question Cusk grapples with. Trains, which play a big part in Tolstoy, punctuate Cusk's novel as well. And so on.) The Bradshaw Variations feels very much like a novel built around A Big Idea, a worthy authorial impulse but one that sacrifices the lovely half-book lurking in there somewhere.
